Sophist

Thanks for the feedback. I think you may be on the right track. I logged back in after making this post, and I was still at the location of the battle, which might suggest a connection issue. If it happens again I'll be to get an F11 report and screenshot.

Greetings, hoping for a bit of feedback. I've recently returned to the game after being away for many years. I ran into a situation in an instance, fighting 1 v 1 with an NPC to complete a mission. I was getting set to board them, came up along side, hit the "G" key to start the boarding process, then I effectively had no controls. The ship was stopped in the water, sails all retracted, whilst my adversary sailed on. I tried various key commends (including G key again), and nothing would work. Could get the ship moving again, no control over the guns, all I was able to do was just scroll in my view ever close to the ship with the mouse wheel. Finally I just existed out of the game. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Edit: I forgot to mention, did notice my ping seemed normal. However it's possible this was simply a server crash/disconnect of some sort as I did not try logging back in right away.

Indeed. I think there were a couple main factors at work back then. 1) Bandwidth was a lot more expensive, and just wasn't as available as it is today. For the most part everything was driven off of provider hosted networks (GEnie, AoL, Delphi, Compuserve, etc), and they charged a lot for access. Moreso for gaming because it ate up a lot of their very limited bandwidth. 2) System resources. Back then hardware was still quite expensive, especially server side systems (this was when "good" NEC desktop monitors ran $4,000, and an 80 mb hard drive was $750). So for a gaming company to host an online game they typically rented system space from someone, and that wasn't cheap. And as you rightly note, the entire genre was in its infancy then so there wasn't the huge player base to pull revenue from. Things have certainly come a long way over a rather short period of time.

Prior to WarBirds, there was Air Warrior, which started the entire massively multiplayer online combat sim genre. I first flew that game in 1989 but didn't really play it actively until about 1991. But at that time, on the GEnie network, you would pay $6.00/hr during non-primetime hours (6:00 PM --> 6:00 AM if I recall correctly), and $12.00/hr if you flew primetime....which of course no one did. So yes, I defintiely agree, people have NO idea how good they have it relative to the way things used were in the not too distant past....and also bearing in mind that was over a 1200 baud modem connected via a crappy phone line going onto an "Internet" that was anything but robust and stable. As an aside I still remember the day that Kelton Flinn sorted out the packet routine to make real-time play possible (it was all scaled back to "half-time" originally to allow data handling to keep up with what you saw on your screen). Every online sim player owes Kelton a debt of gratitude for that game. It started it all and Kesmai broke trail for then entrie game space. Very inspirational folks in that company.